Song of the Ancients (Ancient Magic Book 1) (9 page)

My hand went to Nuin's charm around my neck. I hadn't worn it since the night he gave it to me. As I felt its familiar bloom of warmth, I wondered again if he and this coven were connected to Nicholas and his family in ways I did not yet know.

As I locked the truck door, Nuin appeared out of the darkness. He hugged me tight against him, his hands spread firmly against my back, and stayed in the clench a bit longer than mere friends warranted.

We walked arm in arm to the circle perimeter, where he left me and continued forward to join Maya at the altar.

The coven members cut up the apples, slicing each one sideways to display the seeds arranged in the shape of a five-pointed star. They would be the 'cakes' portion of our cakes and ale at the end of ritual.

Each of us had brought an item symbolizing what we wanted to eliminate from our lives for the coming year. One by one we each threw our representation into the blazing fire. One member brought a broken watch. Her friend next to her laughed. "She's always fifteen minutes late!" A slightly chubby woman threw in a picture of her bathroom scales with obvious relish. I dropped in a ruler to remind me to quit measuring my worth by other peoples' standards. As we continued around the circle, the pile of un-wanted traits grew until the flames licked high above our heads.

We threw our objects in, and Maya chanted:

"Hecate, honored crone of night,

I call upon you to put things right.

Transform these negative thoughts and pain,

Help our lives be whole again."

Nuin and Maya went last. I was interested to see what Nuin wished to release. He pulled an object out of his robe pocket, but before I could see it, he wrapped it in a piece of black cloth and tossed it into the fire. Maya looked at him for a moment, then pulled a bundle of traffic tickets from under her cloak. She dropped them onto the fire with a flourish, shaking her hands in riddance as we shrieked with laughter.

We held hands and swayed as we chanted, letting the flames carry away the dross of the old year.

"I'm free of you and all the strife

You once cast upon my life.

I am healed now. I am free.

As I will, so mote it be!"

When the fire burned down, Maya invited everyone to join her to cut and decorate the Yule tree the following weekend.

I helped clean up the circle and waited while Maya gathered the remains from our ritual fire in a metal bucket. "What are you going to do with the ashes?"

"Take them to a remote spot in the desert where they won't be found and bury them," she said. "We don't want any of this nastiness around our circle or homes."

Nuin finished loading his pickup and joined us. "Any plans for Thanksgiving?"

"I haven't even thought about it," I admitted. "We're volunteering at a homeless shelter the weekend before. I have to bake a half-dozen pumpkin pies for that dinner."

Nuin opened his truck door and pulled a notepad and pen from the seat. He wrote a few lines by the light of the car dome and handed it to me. "Here's my address. Maya and I are hosting an orphan's Thanksgiving feast for friends who can't make it home to their families for the holiday. We'd love to have you come, and Rumor too."

I hugged them both goodbye. "Happy baking!" Nuin called with a wave as I pulled away.

Chapter 13: Hollow Bone

Sinclair pulled a faded, red bandana from his back pocket and wiped the sweat from his face, squinting across the horizon at the setting sun. An hour at most until dark, time for one, maybe two last loads of rocks. He jammed the cloth back in his pocket and shuffled down the trail where it fell steeply off the north side of the plateau.

As he set the last stone in the circle he grumbled, "Why did you send me a second
wasiĉun?
" He had no desire, or patience, to teach a white woman the sacred ways. The thought puckered his mouth, as if he'd just bitten into a lemon. He had been fighting misunderstanding by non-Natives all of his life. They couldn't comprehend how protecting a few spots did little to solve the issue of sacred land, since the spirits of the land were interconnected. These mountains were not sacred in just one place.

This was not the first time he had resisted his guides' instructions. The last woman came up the trail to his campsite alone, just like Samantha. Standing Bear had not sent her; she had come on her own, pleading with him well into the night, asking him to blend his powers with hers. She called him
wicasa wakan
, which was true. He had been a holy man with his tribe and had the shaman's powers to communicate with the spirits. But she also asked him to fight, to redefine his prior beliefs. She said he could predict the future, so surely he knew what was coming and would help her stop the Dark Ones,
Los Oscuros.

He had turned her away.

Instead of accepting his decision, his guides now sent another woman, young and naïve. She would be twice as much trouble as the last. But he could no longer ignore the message.

He sensed the darkness approaching, something bigger and older than the tourist restaurants and white-washed art galleries working their way up every slope. This darkness felt malevolent. Ancient. Older even than the bones of the ancestors buried beneath his feet.

It wanted him. It wanted his power. It saw a weakness in him, a weakness he hadn't recognized until now.

He had isolated himself from his own tribe to live with his wife's people. When she died, childless, he climbed this butte with her relatives to release her spirit to join her ancestors. Afterwards, he felt only loneliness, and a bitter, angry solitude.

His own people believed when a man died, a portal opened between the worlds, so the dying person could enter the realm of the Spirit. But if the man had unfinished business in his world, he would be unable to step though this portal, for he could not carry his worldly identity into the beyond. His channel must be clean, free of resentments, guilt, shame, anger and self-pity.

A stone was lodged in his spirit, preventing him from being pure. He would have to remove it, cleanse and cauterize the wound. Without purity he would fail. Without purity his spirit—and his power—would remain on Earth with his body, unprotected and vulnerable. And then the dark beast would eat him. And laugh.

He sank back onto the soft furs piled in the center of the ring next to the fire. It was time to pluck that stone.

* * * * *

Sinclair grew drowsy. The inward journey began, a quick acceleration, and suddenly his spirit rushed upward, leaving his body behind.

Darkness enveloped him, leaving only the stars to indicate direction. He found Orion's Belt,
Tayamni,
and traced it to Sirius, the wolf's tail, brightest in the heavens this time of year.
Wakan Tanka. All that has been, and all that is.
The image flooded into his mind, overwhelming his consciousness as he descended deeper into the trance.

On Earth below he saw the sacred area where his mate's ancestors were buried, and the circle of stones where his own inert body now lay.

The needed connections are there; the Old Ones are awaiting the call. You have the support needed.

But she is wasicun,
his mind protested.
Not Lakota. Not even of the People.

W
hat happens with one realm affects all others,
the Wolf Star replied.
We are all joined: the People's medicine men, other priests, witches, animals, even the beings beyond and outside the material realm. The stars themselves are the eyes of the Watchers in the night sky. We are all caretakers for the Mother.

Sinclair felt his limp form drop softly to the ground below and sink into the earth. Down, down until his body began to disintegrate. He surrendered to the feeling, thinking,
if this is what you want.

His flesh began to peel off. A mother wolf ripped flesh from his bones, feeding it to her pups.
We all used to eat each other, share the marrow of our bones, our nutrients and our very essence with each other. This is how we are related on the deepest of levels.

A blue-black raven hopped over for an easy meal, watching him with one obsidian eye.
As you cleanse your spirit, your body also becomes pure. You will be sterile meat for the beast and will not fulfill its hunger, will not make it stronger.
The scavenger pecked at Sinclair's head, pulling out three long silver hairs and dropping them on his chest.

The medicine man sank lower still into the earth, to its seething volcanic core. His remains liquefied and were pressured into molten magma. Riding the blazing red river upward, it shot to the earth's surface and he felt his life's blood and the blood of all his ancestors flow across the sacred ground. Expanding… radiating in bliss. Finally cooling and molding back into solid form.

For several heartbeats he stayed perfectly still, slowly settling back into his body, a heavy sense of reality after the lightness of the spirit's escape.

Then he opened his eyes.

Above him stood a ring of faces. Watching. The mother wolf and her pups.

We are all linked
. She pushed the thought into his mind.
We must all be hollow bones.

Chapter 14: Ripples through Time

New Year's Eve. The date of my fateful blood moon. I paced the kitchen floor Sunday morning in my bathrobe. My research revealed as many superstitions surrounding a blood moon as there were actual events. Scientists explained the reddish glow of the lunar blood eclipse by the Earth's atmosphere, which refracted the light and filtered out the shorter blue and green light waves. Zealots proclaimed it an omen of the coming end of times. "The sun shall be returned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord's coming," according to the Hebrew Bible's Book of Joel.

I couldn't contradict the dire Bible predictions. A devastating event loomed. But what did any of it have to do with
my
power? What did I have that anyone would want, much less kill for? Why had Standing Bear seen me dancing with an old Indian woman in a thunderstorm? I sipped my coffee and watched the cursor blink on the computer screen, ticking off the seconds remaining in my life.
Oh, get off it Sam. You don't do morbid
. This was getting me nowhere. I closed the screen. Maybe my least-favorite shaman would have an answer in the morning.

* * * * *

He waited for me on the flat top butte again, leaning against a boulder. The rocky ground around his feet was littered with shavings. "
Oki ni-kso-ko-wa
, little
bruja
." He continued stroking his bone-handled knife along a piece of dark wood, whittling a partially-formed figure.

A flash of feathers caught his attention. "Shhhh." He pointed to a raven sitting in the scraggly tree on the cliff's edge. "He's following us. This is not his normal home. He likes tall pines better than scrub pinon."

I walked slowly to Sinclair and put down my backpack, careful not to disturb the bird. It cocked its head to watch the medicine man. He smoothed a beak onto the face of his wood creature.

Sinclair made clicking noises through his teeth to keep the bird's attention and deftly cut a round eye into the right side of the head, another into the left. The carving was a good likeness of the raven and a perfect choice for the black wood.

I leaned against the boulder to wait in silence. As soon as I quit my restless stirring, I felt the soul of this sacred place, a primordial energy lodged deep in the rocks beneath my feet. It pushed and swelled here, swayed and gave there. I felt the water deep inside the earth, saw the bones embedded in her striations. The love of the ancestors pushed its way toward my feet on the surface. I put my hand on the rocky soil and felt a heartbeat beneath my palm.

Plus something else, something heartless and unnatural which didn’t belong.

My eyes filled with tears. What was the emotion? Fear. Anger
. Hate.
The feeling wormed its way into my mind, a creeping presence of steam and dark. It felt as though something festered inside the earth, a rotten writhing thing caught in the crevices of sandstone. I opened my mouth and from somewhere deep within me a sound emerged. My strangled wail rolled down the butte and resounded through the canyon.

The shaman stopped carving to watch me. He looked as surprised as I felt by my sudden outburst. "Hollow bone," he muttered, "and a white woman." He shook his head, and the raven flapped away with a guttural chuckle. Watching the black bird disappear below the plateau, he shrugged his bony shoulders. "Guess my guides were right."

I shivered, shaking off the feeling of darkness pressing down on me, despite the late afternoon sun. "Pardon me?"

"Don't mind this old man. Talkin' to myself comes from livin' alone so long."

"I doubt you say anything without a reason."

He narrowed his eyes. He was measuring me, assessing my spiritual core. Though Nicholas had felt me lacking, Sinclair seemed satisfied with what he saw.

He shrugged. "It is an old saying of my people.
Ohlo-geca hohu. Hollow bone
. It means being in tune to the earth, being a channel for energy. You felt it, didn't you?"

I shivered. "I don't know what
it
is, but I felt something."

"Sure you did," Sinclair said. "This is a sacred site. The bones of my wife's people are in this ground. You felt them reactin'."

"Reacting to what?"

Sinclair closed his knife and dropped it in his shirt pocket. "Don't know exactly, not yet. But somethin's here and it don't belong."

"And you think the ancestors are reacting to it?"

"I know they are. Sacred places are direct conduits, consecrated, made holy with offerings, songs and ceremonies, births and burials. But now something else has pushed its way up close to the surface. And whatever it is, the Ancestors don't like it. I had you meet me up here to get your feel for the place." He nodded slowly, and his voice dropped lower, as if he didn't want to be overheard. "Somethin's coming. The Old Ones feel it before the rest of us."

He pointed a finger at me. "You're a natural
hollow bone.
You've had spirit feelings other places, too, haven't you? Does it scare you?"